We have a series Customer Case Studies, in which we take your stories and share your challenges and successes as a learning tool for other RunSignUp users. This Bluegrass Runners Case Study focuses on automated club management tools and membership discounts.

Bluegrass Runners and RunSignUp

The Bluegrass Runners moved to RunSignUp to make club management and renewals easier and more automated, and benefited from the visibility that Membership Discount and Suggestion gave to the club.

About Bluegrass Runners

The Bluegrass Runners, Kentucky’s original running club, is a Lexington, KY based running club that was founded in 1972 to promote fitness, fellowship, and fun for runners of all ages and abilities. As a club, they also organize the 2,500 participant Thoroughbred Classic on Thanksgiving morning.

Automated Member Management

Prior to RunSignUp, the Bluegrass Runners managed their club memberships via Google doc, with manual Paypal payments. That process was highly manual – for their 12-month membership, they needed to regularly determine whose memberships were expiring, send an email through Mail Chip, and manually add or remove people based on their payment status.

The RunSignUp membership management has helped with renewals – alerts are a really easy way to renew memberships, and increases the percentage who renew on time.

Thoroughbred Classic and Bluegrass Runners Membership

The Thanksgiving Day Thoroughbred Classic draws ~2,500 runners. This year, they were able to turn on the automatic Club Membership discount. With this turned on:

Club Members are automatically detected by RunSignUp, and are given a $5 discount on race registration.

Non-Club Members automatically receive a suggestion to join the Bluegrass Runners to gain access to the discount.

“We gave a $5 discount to all club members, even if you joined during registration, and we were shocked by how many people did join. In November (Race month), we had 61 new members – that’s more than double the previous month. For years, our membership has hovered around 175-180, and we are now at 256.” – Matt Reno, Bluegrass Runners President

Simple Donations

The Thoroughbred Classic raises money for seven charities. In 2015, they were able to donate more to their charities than any previous year. Included in that was the $2,124 donated through RunSignUp with a simple donation mechanism in the registration process. One additional benefit of collecting donations in Registration? The Thoroughbred Classic is able to get a sense of what charities are of particular interest to their running community based on the donations received for each option.

What’s Next?

As the Bluegrass Runners learn more of the RunSignUp system, they are excited to start using the Email Marketing that is now integrated in the Club System. Additionally, they want to take another look at the functionality of the free Club Websites to reduce duplicating work by updating information on both their WordPress site and the RunSignUp site.

“Our experience with RunSignUp this year has been really positive. It’s really helped us to modernize and streamline.” – Matt Reno

If you have a success story about your race, store or club, big or small, email us
…we’d love to explore a Case Study on your topic!